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ATTN. Please enjoy your food

Here’s a very short letter for you today, since I’m at the beach with family for a long weekend and can only ignore them for so long. First a quick bit of housekeeping. There’s a little ATTN. badge over there on the left. If you don’t see it, something went wrong. I’m grateful to Darryl Brown for the graphics assist. The badge will show up here, and on the brand spanking new ATTN. archive site. The URL is attnplea.se, the double entendre of which pleases me greatly. 🙂

You Shall Not Buy

Here in the U.S., it’s the day after Thanksgiving and consumerism is in full effect. It’s kinda gross, actually. For years now, AdBusters has organized Buy Nothing Day. The posters are still cool, though the movement seems to be less visible these days. Or maybe the ideas are spreading more broadly: check out the front page of Patagonia.com today (screenshot).

But I’m a pragmatist and a good deal is a good deal. I kinda don’t even want to start telling you about some of the deals that are going on, because you have a brain and can find them yourself. Those were some weird disclaimers I just wrote. Do I sound conflicted? Anyway, there’s no need to camp all night in front of a store (I’ll admit to doing this for REI return sales, but c’mon, I was in college). The Wirecutter has the best roundup of online gadgety deals, if that’s your thing. The Clymb has some ridiculous deals on outdoorsy stuff (invite if you need it). RetailMeNot has the rest of it. And that’s enough of that. (Why isn’t there a deal on the Whisky Advent Calendar?)

Obligatory Book Section

One book that I haven’t read yet is How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read [insert joke about needing this book in college]. Rest assured that I will eventually read it (Maria Popova already has). I’ll probably grab it from my local library. It is sometimes a hassle find a book on a web site like Amazon, and then copy the title, then fire up your library’s reservation page, paste in the title, and reserve the book. A little trick that might help speed things up is the old library bookmarklet generator. If it works for your library, it will totally be worth the time it takes to figure out and build the correct bookmarklet. It didn’t work for me a few years ago, so I had a smart undergrad build me a version that did work. Very handy.